Ira Jones interview recording, 1994 July 22
Loading the media player...
Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
Ira Lee Jones | I was born in East Lake area, Birmingham, what is commonly called 77th Street. That's what everybody referred to it. But originally, it is East Lake. See, I stayed in East Lake until I was 58 years old, off and on until I was 58 years old. Most of the time, I was there, I was going to school and stuff. | 0:00 |
Ira Lee Jones | I went to school in Woodlawn, a school called Patterson School. It's still standing. I don't think it's being used for a school now, but it's still standing, and to a Industrial High School, which is now Parker. | 0:34 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, East Lake, was that an area where people who worked in the steel industry might've lived? | 0:57 |
Ira Lee Jones | There were a few who worked in Sloss's. Not Sloss but one of the furnaces downtown. One or two people worked in that. Most of the people—It is a very small place in the first place. And most of those people that I think worked at Steel Plant on 10th Avenue, and I can't remember the name of it right now. | 1:03 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. | 1:38 |
Ira Lee Jones | Stockham Pipe Shop. That's what it is. | 1:42 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. And what did your parents do? | 1:44 |
Ira Lee Jones | My mother basically did laundry, brought in laundry for White people. She did that. My daddy worked at a coal distributor company. | 1:53 |
Paul Ortiz | Would your mother go and gather laundry and bring it back to the house? | 2:13 |
Ira Lee Jones | Uh-huh. My mother, my brother and me, all of would go in a different place and pick it up, bring it home. | 2:16 |
Paul Ortiz | So you did that kind of work as a child? | 2:30 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, as a small child, until I finished high school. | 2:33 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you know the name of the company that your father worked for? | 2:39 |
Ira Lee Jones | McKinley Coal Transfer Company. And by the time I was in college, he started working for the Board of Education. He worked at the warehouse for Birmingham Board of Education. | 2:51 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. What were your earliest childhood memories of East Lake? | 3:10 |
Ira Lee Jones | My earliest remembrance? Oh, let's see. I was a tomboy. My earliest remember was climbing trees and my daddy would cut them down as fast as I'd get used to climbing. Well, it was going to school and getting to and from school was not the greatest thing. It was a mile away from our house. And mother didn't want us to walk, so most of the time she'd put a quarter's worth of gas in the car and take us. A quarter's worth of gas at that time was a lot of gas. And she would take us back and forth to school and it was fun to see her learn to drive. | 3:19 |
Ira Lee Jones | And she also bought us a piano. Taking other children back and forth to school, they'd pay a quarter. She would take them and she paid for a piano like that so we could take music lessons. | 4:07 |
Paul Ortiz | And you said that your mom was really learning how to drive? | 4:31 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, she learned how to drive during the time we were 'bout fourth or fifth grade. | 4:34 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you remember the kind of car? | 4:42 |
Ira Lee Jones | We had a Whippet. | 4:44 |
Paul Ortiz | A Whippet? Now I haven't heard of it. | 4:46 |
Ira Lee Jones | I bet. I don't think they made, but a few of them. We had what we would call a Whippet because every time it'd get cold you'd have to push it, because it was not the very best car in the world. But it would run fine after it'd get warmed up. But you'd have a hard time warming it up. But I don't think they made but one year. We had it was brown Whippet. | 4:48 |
Paul Ortiz | And you had sisters and brothers? | 5:20 |
Ira Lee Jones | I had one brother. | 5:21 |
Paul Ortiz | What was the neighborhood like at East Lake? | 5:33 |
Ira Lee Jones | The neighborhood, the street that we lived on was dead end street, and it was very quiet. About two blocks over was what they called Brown Springs. It was a spring with a brown clothing around it. And people would come from everywhere in Birmingham and have a picnic out there, especially on Saturdays. And they would be very noisy and squabbling and what have you. But otherwise East Lake was very quiet, small entity in Birmingham. | 5:37 |
Paul Ortiz | Would those be church organized picnics? | 6:20 |
Ira Lee Jones | They were supposed to be, but they weren't organized in East Lake. They would be coming from other parts of town. | 6:22 |
Paul Ortiz | So they would just be big gatherings of people? | 6:30 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes, big gatherings of people. | 6:33 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you have fun at those? | 6:36 |
Ira Lee Jones | Sometimes, yeah. Being a tomboy, one of the things I did enjoy doing was going up on the mountain. About a mile from our house was a mountain. It wasn't very high, but they had the light up there to guide the airplanes in. Because I remember when they built the airport in Birmingham. I was a little girl. I remember that. And I would like to go up there and climb up in the light and you could hear my mama calling me all the way. She'd get down there, and we'd come down the hill and everybody be saying, "Your mama call you, your mom call you." But it was a lot of fun to just go up there and see how fast we could climb up those rungs and they'd be about that far apart. It was a lot of fun. | 6:38 |
Ira Lee Jones | We played softball a lot. That I didn't like. I was the child who stayed in the house most of the time. And to keep from doing a lot of work, I'd play on the piano. Get me a church book and sit down and play all the songs in church book. As long as I played the piano, nobody didn't bother me 'bout doing no work. So that was great for me. And that was also a way for me to make little money. By the time I was in high school, I would play for Sunday schools, churches and get paid for it. So I had my own little change. | 7:43 |
Paul Ortiz | And did your parents approve of the fact that you were a tomboy? | 8:33 |
Ira Lee Jones | No, they didn't. That's why the trees get cut down so fast. But I just like to climb the trees, and I'd climb. They'd holler, "You got to get out of here and go somewhere." They look around, I'd be up in a tree. So it was better for me to stay in the house than to go out there and climb the trees. We had a pecan tree. I'd go out and shake the pecan area because my brother wasn't going up the tree. But I would. | 8:39 |
Ira Lee Jones | I am trying to think of something that happened in the segregation area. East Lake wasn't so bad about being segregated. I guess we kind of knew where our boundaries were and we stayed there. My grandfather was one of the earliest settlers in that area and everybody knew him and just we had no problems with segregation. | 9:09 |
Ira Lee Jones | The only real segregation that I can recount of my early years was going to school because we had to pass the White high school to get to the Black, where the Negroes went to school. And from where I lived to where the school was was nine miles. And we had to ride the bus, not a school bus, but the city-owned bus. And if it was snowing or rain or whatever, we had problems getting to and from the bus. And the White kids didn't seem to have that problem. They were at school while we were trying to sludge through the snow to get there to our school. | 9:55 |
Ira Lee Jones | And we used the books, but they were always what we call the hand-me-downs. They were raggedy books. They would put another back on the books, but they never replaced the pages that the White kids had torn out. So our teachers always had problems filling in the parts of the lesson that was missing from the book. And had we not had good teachers, I don't think we would've made it at all. But they were all kind, thorough, and ready to do a good job. | 10:46 |
Ira Lee Jones | I don't think any of my classmates had any problems getting into college. And most of us did go to college. Some went to Alabama State, some went to Fisk, some went to college in Talledega. I went to A&M in Huntsville. Quite a few of us went to A&M in Huntsville. That's a state school. And most of us came out and went into the classroom. That was not my biggest aim in life was to go teach, but that's what I did. Because I wanted to be a seamstress. I could sew, but I didn't try to make a living doing it. I just went into teaching. | 11:35 |
Paul Ortiz | And was that a decision you made because of— | 12:33 |
Ira Lee Jones | Well, there wasn't too many opportunities for Blacks to go into business at that time. I thought my mother had worked enough and I had an opportunity to be offered a teaching position in the county, in St. Clair County. So I took it, and from that I finally did get a decent job in Birmingham. | 12:39 |
Paul Ortiz | Now when you and other students were going the nine miles to school and riding the, now was this a bus you were riding or was it a streetcar? | 13:16 |
Ira Lee Jones | It was a bus. It was what was known as a streetcar, but it was really a bus. | 13:29 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh. | 13:36 |
Ira Lee Jones | Uh-huh. They had buses. But it was a city bus and we had to pay carfare. That was pretty tough on most of us. Most of our parents, they have to pay carfare. We could buy a book of tickets. The tickets would last a month, but they were also pretty expensive for what our parents made. | 13:36 |
Paul Ortiz | And these were segregated buses? | 14:03 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh yeah. Yeah. They were segregated buses. We had to stay in the back of the bus. And most of the time after we passed 68th Street, it was always crowded. But the White part would not be crowded, but we couldn't sit up there. | 14:06 |
Paul Ortiz | Would you or anybody else complain about that when you [indistinct 00:14:35]? | 14:28 |
Ira Lee Jones | There were no complaints. I guess we hadn't really thought of it at that time about complaining. This was in the late thirties or early forties. We used to laugh about the fact that there were people that we knew as Black, people who lived with the Black people, who maybe had a Black husband or they were really Black themselves. But they looked White and they would get on the bus in the front and it would be funny to us because the bus driver wouldn't know that they were not really White. And that was a lot of fun. We just laughed about it. Being young, it didn't bother us to stand up. The only thing that we didn't like was being all crowded up together. But we made it. | 14:35 |
Paul Ortiz | Was there in Birmingham during those years, and I guess you would only see this as you matured, would you say that there was a difference between, say, East Lake and other predominantly Black neighborhoods such as Ensley? | 15:30 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh, yes. Ensley was more densely populated and it was a rowdy little place. They always had something going in Ensley. It wasn't so much a race business going on, but the Negroes didn't get along with each other. East Lake was a different kind of place because most of those people were either homeowners who had lived there for years or they were relatives or very good friends who had moved into almost side by side. You had very few people arguing with each other, and no community fights. Ensley was not like that. | 15:53 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh really? | 16:47 |
Ira Lee Jones | No. You had people who were working in the mines near Ensley and in Ensley. And they would come in on weekends and it would always be some problem, that something had happened, somebody had gotten cut or killed or shot, or had a big fight, or something like that had happened in Ensley, in North Birmingham. North Birmingham where the railroads, most the fellows worked on the railroad, and they were tough. But East Lake was not that. But we came in contact with all these kids though when we got to high school. | 16:48 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. | 17:41 |
Ira Lee Jones | They came from all over Birmingham to go to that one Black high school. | 17:44 |
Paul Ortiz | What were the kids like from, say, North Birmingham? | 17:48 |
Ira Lee Jones | They were tough, but they were not nearly as tough as those from Ensley. Now Birmingham was a rowdy little place. That was the railroad area. Yeah, they had an elementary school over there. Lewis School was over there. It's still there. But they did not have a high school at that time. They do now, but they didn't then. | 17:54 |
Paul Ortiz | Now you said that one of the things that made East Lake different than Ensley or North Birmingham was that there was more of a sense that there's a community. | 18:36 |
Ira Lee Jones | It was more community, yeah. We had two churches, the Methodist Church and the Baptist church. And either you went to the Methodist church or you went to the Baptist church. Very few people did not go to church at least once a month. Most of them went most of the time. And they were neighbors. You could go to anybody's house. If you needed help, they would have to help you. Say your car wouldn't start, somebody'd come along and help you push it off and this kind of thing. You didn't get that everywhere because so many people didn't know each other. But in East Lake they did. | 18:46 |
Paul Ortiz | The Methodist church, was that a United Methodist church? | 19:41 |
Ira Lee Jones | No, it wasn't. It was an A M E. That was not a United Methodist church out there. | 19:45 |
Paul Ortiz | And which church did your family go to? | 19:52 |
Ira Lee Jones | We went to the Baptist Church. | 19:55 |
Paul Ortiz | The Baptist. One second. Oh, I know. Now, were your parents born in Birmingham or had they? | 20:02 |
Ira Lee Jones | My mother was born in St. Clair County, that's the next county from Jefferson County going toward Gadsden. And my daddy was born Birmingham. Really he was born in what they call Pleasant Hill. It's really out in the country from Roebuck. | 20:07 |
Paul Ortiz | I see. So they were [indistinct 00:20:38] really. | 20:28 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. | 20:34 |
Paul Ortiz | And did they own your house? | 20:44 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes. | 20:45 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you know or do you have a remembrance of your grandparents? | 20:53 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes, I do. I remember I lived with my grandmother and grandfather for about four, maybe five years. When my grandmother died, my grandfather moved back with my mother. I said back because I wasn't going until he did. So we both moved back in the house with my mother. So I knew them real well. My grandfather was not a church-goer for a long time. But my grandmother was sure that the doors couldn't open until she got there. | 20:59 |
Paul Ortiz | So it sounds like your grandparents that they had quite an influence on you? | 21:49 |
Ira Lee Jones | Well, they did. They did. I was my granddaddy's biggest baby, because I was his only granddaughter. He had one grandson and one granddaughter, and he was a spoiler. If he thought we needed it or wanted it, he would see to it that we got it. So that made it easier on my mother. Sometimes it made it difficult on my grandma because she didn't want him to do quite all the stuff he would do. But it was fun. I enjoyed it. I loved him for it. He was quite a grandfather. | 21:54 |
Paul Ortiz | What kind of activities would he or things? | 22:40 |
Ira Lee Jones | He liked to whistle. You could hear him two blocks away whistling, and he gambled, he'd shoot dice. And when I was a tiny child, I'd follow him, sit on his shoulder while he'd shoot dice. He was lucky, so he would always win. And then he would stick his money everywhere—In his shoes, in the leg of his pants, down his bosom, anywhere he could find to stick it—so people wouldn't know how much he had won. And when he'd get home, we'd have a good time unloading his money. But he was a kind man and he didn't have a bad temper or anything. But he just liked to shoot dice, and that's all he would do. He didn't play cards anything, just go wherever they were going to shoot dice, and shoot. And then he'd come home. And he worked in the same job that my daddy worked in. | 22:45 |
Paul Ortiz | At that McKinley plant? | 23:45 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, and at the Department of Education warehouse. | 23:51 |
Paul Ortiz | What kind of a person was your grandmother? | 24:04 |
Ira Lee Jones | My grandmother was kind, beautiful Black woman, really Black. I think, Blacker than me sometimes. That liked to dress. She sewed really well, and she made all her clothes. Mine too. And she would always be dressed down. She'd dress in her satins and all this kind of thing because Black people would put on stuff like that. She would be pretty, a lovely lady. Wasn't loud. I don't know of any vices that she ever participated in. She didn't drink, smoke, anything like that. She was just church-going. She'd go to Bible classes. She loved the circus. | 24:08 |
Paul Ortiz | Circles? | 25:04 |
Ira Lee Jones | Circus. When the animals and stuff come to town. She loved that. I don't ever remember her going to a movie, but she'd go to the circus. | 25:06 |
Paul Ortiz | And now where had your grandparents came from? Were they also from—? | 25:21 |
Ira Lee Jones | My grandmother was from St. Clair County and I really don't know where my grandfather came from. But they met in Birmingham, so I don't know where he came from. | 25:25 |
Paul Ortiz | Would they ever tell stories about their upbringing or their younger days or? | 25:41 |
Ira Lee Jones | My grandmother came from a farm. They farmed in St. Clair County. And her first husband was part Indian. Excuse me. | 25:54 |
Paul Ortiz | And your grandmother was, you were saying that she grew up farming? | 26:10 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, she grew up in a farming community in St. Clair County. And her first husband was part Indian. That was my mother's father. I don't know too much about my grandfather. I don't know where he came from. I know he had sisters and brothers and his mother, I remember his mother and sisters and brothers lived in Birmingham when I was small. I remember each of them. I don't remember when his mother died, but I can remember several of his sisters and brothers when they died. And they were all living in this same area, in the East Lake area. | 26:18 |
Paul Ortiz | Was it common in East Lake when you were growing up there for families or for kinfolk to live in the same area? | 27:25 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes, most of them did. | 27:39 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh really? | 27:42 |
Ira Lee Jones | I think maybe that helped the East Lake community stay as calm as it did because it was always somebody nearby that was related. Or they had been there for so long, you were still calling them Aunt So-and-So, Uncle So-and-So. They just felt close. So the children were told to do what Ms. So-and-So said do, because they were Ms. So-and-So's old lady. Now she don't want to have all that stuff out of y'all. And we would do what they said. They say, "Go home," and we go home. They'd tell us too, "Y'all been out there with that screaming long enough now. I'm tired of it. Go home." We'd go home. | 27:42 |
Ira Lee Jones | But most of them was related. Most of my daddy's folk were in Zion City. That's north of East Lake, across the First Avenue. If somebody told you, "This is First Avenue," you take that street and go all the way downtown. Well, north of that it was called Zion City back up on the hill. Most of my daddy's folk were there, and from there. My mother's people, she didn't have too many relatives because she was the only child. She had two uncles and they didn't live in that area, in the downtown area about 18th Street and 10th Avenue in that area of Birmingham. | 28:31 |
Paul Ortiz | How old were you when you began attending school? | 29:46 |
Ira Lee Jones | I was six. | 29:51 |
Paul Ortiz | Six. | 29:51 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. | 29:53 |
Paul Ortiz | And was that a grammar school that was in East Lake? | 29:56 |
Ira Lee Jones | No, it was in the basement of a church. And I went to grammar school, went to Patterson, at eight, when I was eight. | 29:59 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, Patterson Elementary. | 30:16 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. | 30:17 |
Paul Ortiz | And this would've been in the early thirties? | 30:22 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes. | 30:25 |
Paul Ortiz | And was Patterson a county school? | 30:29 |
Ira Lee Jones | No. A city school. | 30:31 |
Paul Ortiz | A city school. | 30:31 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. | 30:31 |
Paul Ortiz | What were your favorite subjects? | 30:32 |
Ira Lee Jones | I think my favorite subject was English, until I got to the fifth grade and then it changed to home economics. Anything that had to do with the home economics class was just what I was looking for. | 30:44 |
Paul Ortiz | Was that in terms of, was that sewing? | 31:07 |
Ira Lee Jones | Sewing, cooking, setting up housekeeping. Anything but cleaning it. And I didn't want to clean it. But to pretend I'm setting up this room for a party or whatever. Whatever they were going to do in the home ec class was fine with me. And the discussions. | 31:12 |
Paul Ortiz | And then from Patterson? | 31:49 |
Ira Lee Jones | To, at that time it was Industrial High School and now it is Parker. | 31:53 |
Paul Ortiz | So you finished out the eighth grade in Patterson? | 32:01 |
Ira Lee Jones | In Patterson, yes. | 32:04 |
Paul Ortiz | What was family life like during this time? | 32:11 |
Ira Lee Jones | It was the same. It hadn't changed any. It was just a little more activity because we had to go to school more for activities. I sang in the choir, and my brother played football, and we had activities at school. It was always somewhere to go and something to do on that basis. But just family life in itself, it had not changed. | 32:21 |
Paul Ortiz | Did things begin to change a bit later, when the Depression hit the air? | 32:54 |
Ira Lee Jones | During the Depression—I told you I had two uncles. They lived on 10th Avenue about 18th Street. One worked for Hormel Packing. And, see, if they had the meat and it didn't sell that day they couldn't sell it as fresh meat the next day. So they would give it to the men who worked there. And he always bring us a supply of meat. And my grandmother and my mother had gardens. | 33:03 |
Ira Lee Jones | And I guess it did change a bit because they lived next door to each other by this time. We had food and my mother still was taking in those washing and ironing, so we'd have a little money. And I can remember several times I've gone to the grocery store and had a list and I knew exactly how much everything was going to cost. You had to worry about that, what it's going to cost. And when I'd get back home and sit down and look at it, I'd have too much money. And I often think now that they did that on purpose, the men who worked in the store just know we didn't have no money at start with, so they just didn't charge us full price for everything. Because it happened too many times. I know they could count. And I said, "Well, maybe that was one of our blessings." | 33:39 |
Paul Ortiz | Where would you go shopping at? | 34:41 |
Ira Lee Jones | On First Avenue and 77th street, there was a grocery store, drug store, shoe shop. Just everything that you would need in any small town. That was six blocks from our house. | 34:43 |
Paul Ortiz | Six blocks? | 35:03 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. | 35:05 |
Paul Ortiz | Were there Black businesses or were these Black-owned? | 35:06 |
Ira Lee Jones | White. | 35:08 |
Paul Ortiz | White-owned. | 35:08 |
Ira Lee Jones | No Black-owned businesses but beauty parlors and there were none down there. | 35:12 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, when you would go with your mother to collect laundry, what neighborhoods would you go to? | 35:22 |
Ira Lee Jones | We would still be in East Lake area, but see where we lived, we lived from Fourth Avenue back to the mountains on the south side. And that was where the Black people lived. From 73rd Street, down that way, that's where the White people lived, all around that. We lived up here. | 35:31 |
Ira Lee Jones | So we would go all around, from 80th Street all the way back. I don't think we went to 68th Street. The Ku Klux Klan and all those folks lived in that area. And maybe in some of your research you heard of the place called, what's that place named where they had all those segregation meetings, where they had the White Citizens Council and all that was 68th Street and Second Avenue South. | 36:04 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh really? | 36:50 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah. So we didn't bother with those dynamics, those people. | 36:51 |
Paul Ortiz | That was on 68th Street? | 36:55 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, 68th Street and Second Avenue South. | 37:00 |
Paul Ortiz | How would you find out that that was an area that was unsafe for Black people? | 37:09 |
Ira Lee Jones | Well, the first time I remember my mother told me a lady that she had been washing for told her that a lady in that area needed somebody to sit with her father while she went to work. But she only was going to be gone for three hours a day. So my mama said she could do that. So she went in to stay with this gentleman and he wanted her to move his dresser drawers because he had a belt back there that he wanted to get. And she said she thought he needed the belt to put his pants on. So she moved the dresser and got the belt. And it was this wide belt and very thick. And she wondered how was he going to wear it? Said, but he didn't want to wear it. He just sat up there in the chair doing this with the belt, saying, "This is the way I used to whoop niggers." | 37:16 |
Ira Lee Jones | And my mother said she had to stay there with him till his daughter got home. But she left then and she told her, "No, I won't be back." And then we started to be suspicious that things weren't quite right in that area. And then by the time Martin Luther King started the movement, then we would see more and more cars there when we'd come from school or going to school. And it was supposed to be a like a resort, swimming pool. What was that name of that piece? I can't think of it to save my neck. It'll come to me maybe. | 38:18 |
Paul Ortiz | Was it a hotel or? | 38:59 |
Ira Lee Jones | No, it was like a nightclub or something. But they had a swimming pool and served food and a whole lot of stuff. And all the time that Martin Luther King was marching, there would be more and more people there and with tags from all over Alabama. And it just got so it would just be crowded with people. And we would hear policemen. They didn't try to hide it either. You would go to the grocery store and they would be in the store talking to the White men, asking them to come to the meeting and asking if they wanted to be auxiliary police to ride around at night and see that the niggers don't get into nothing. Now that was the conversation. | 39:00 |
Ira Lee Jones | So we just stayed out of the area because we knew it was dangerous for us to be there. And finally they broke themselves up. See, they was making money. They paid dues and stuff. They had a lot of money. And they had little groups. This was the executive group, and this was the executive executive group. And they got squabbling over who was going to handle the money. And they were in a movie house downtown in Second Avenue and 19th Street having one of those meetings. But they had the lights out because they did not want each other to know who they were. It was the most secret thing. Nobody wanted to be known as a Ku Klux Klanner. | 39:59 |
Ira Lee Jones | And they got to arguing about the money and they got to shooting at each other. Several of them got killed and most of the ones got killed was the ones who lived in that 68th Street area. And then after that, those that didn't get killed, all of them moved out. Moved out and left town. And that's what broke the Ku Klux Klan up so bad because it was hundreds of them. And they'd parade and they had their conversations on the radio. Television wasn't that prevalent at that time. And they couldn't get the WBRC too well, so they could talk on the radio. They'd talk on the radio. Nobody know who it was until they started killing each other. Then everybody knew who they were. It wasn't funny. | 40:53 |
Paul Ortiz | And now this activity, when they were killing each other, that was during the sixties? | 42:10 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, that was during the sixties. | 42:16 |
Paul Ortiz | But you remember when they were? | 42:19 |
Ira Lee Jones | When they were organizing, it was during the forties when they had started having their meeting down there. Gosh, I can't think of the name of that place. That's crazy. That's one of those blocks you pull from the heart attacks. You know you pull blocks. You see, when you have a heart attack, you don't get all your air to your brain and that part just deteriorates. And sometimes your mind don't click right there. And sometimes it come back to you and sometimes it doesn't. So that's one of those things that haven't come back yet. It maybe will. | 42:20 |
Paul Ortiz | That already happens to me. | 43:12 |
Ira Lee Jones | It is not funny either, because sometimes it just frustrates you. You know what you're talking about and can't say word. It just kind of gets you. | 43:12 |
Paul Ortiz | But you remember even as a young girl that there was Klan activity? | 43:24 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh yeah, there was Klan activity in that area. Not in this area up here where we lived, but in the other area near that 68th Street area back in there. On Second Avenue, Third Avenue North, it was Ku Klux Klan lived down there. But you couldn't say that these are Ku Klux Klan because you couldn't put your hand on them. And you know the police was recruiting them. The police recruited them and they did not hide that fact. They'd just come right out and ask them in the stores and on the street, or whatever. | 43:34 |
Paul Ortiz | I mean, would they do that even when they knew that Black people were there? | 44:28 |
Ira Lee Jones | Sure. That's why they did it. I have heard any number of them ask. That's why I know the police recruited them because I heard it with my ears. I saw it with my eyes. | 44:31 |
Paul Ortiz | Uh-huh. And was this during the forties? | 44:49 |
Ira Lee Jones | During the forties and the early fifties, they were recruiting. | 44:50 |
Paul Ortiz | Did it seem like it might've been—Well it sounds like even during that recruiting it was kind of they were trying to intimidate. | 45:02 |
Ira Lee Jones | They did. They were trying, yeah. They always tried to intimidate you. Now I've been down in the main part of town. You wouldn't know it was activity down there like it was in the forties and fifties and early sixties if you go down there now, because it's all dead. All the stores have moved out and everything. But it was the most active place. And if I went into a furniture store— | 45:09 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. | 45:42 |
Ira Lee Jones | I went into a furniture store to pay a bill for an elderly lady that lived in my community. When I walked in the door, I walked up to the cash register and the lady at the cash register said, "Stand over there, girl." Now I know I wasn't no girl because, at this time, I was teaching. So I know I was over 21. She said, "Stand over there, girl." So I didn't want to argue with her. I just moved over there. I stood there, I guess, about 20 minutes. | 0:03 |
Ira Lee Jones | Finally, when somebody came and asked me what did I want, I told him I wanted to pay the bill for Mrs. Long. He said, "Where's the money?" I handed him the money. He reached his hand in his pocket and got his handkerchief and took the money, and I laughed. I said, "That's really going to help you." But I didn't go back in that store anymore. I thought that was real silly. | 0:41 |
Paul Ortiz | Would you have similar experiences with discrimination or know other people had those kinds of experiences? | 1:19 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh, yeah. That was common. That was common. The first time I had been involved in anything like that, but that was a common thing. People, I would tell them about it. They'd say, "Oh, they do that all the time. They don't want you in the store." I said, "Well, how did they let her buy their furniture if they don't want her in the store?" "They say you supposed to send the money in." I said, "No, I won't buy their furniture then." | 1:26 |
Ira Lee Jones | My family did business with Rhodes Carroll. This was [indistinct 00:01:59] furniture. I'll never forget that name. That man reached in his pocket and got his handkerchief to take the money. I guess I was supposed to poison it or something. I don't know what I was supposed to do with it. | 1:52 |
Paul Ortiz | Would your parents talk about segregation or give the children warnings about race relations? | 2:17 |
Ira Lee Jones | Never. I don't remember them telling anything but, "Watch where you go. Just be careful where you go." Because by the time we got in high school, my brother had learned to drive. She'd tell us don't go in certain parts of town and to be sure that what time we were supposed to get back home, that we got there. Don't mess around. Come straight home. We'd go to dances at the Civic Center because they would give dances just for the Blacks or give dances just for Whites. | 2:32 |
Ira Lee Jones | But if we went to a concert, we had to sit upstairs and the White sit downstairs. There was a movie house that we could go to and we'd sit upstairs. The Blacks sit upstairs, and the Whites sit downstairs. But then there was on 17th Street and Fourth Avenue, there was Black movies. But we couldn't go to the movies downtown. They would tell us, "Be sure you get back home. What time the movie is going to be out?" We'd tell her. "Okay, you got a half hour. You can drive home in a half hour. Be sure you get back, now. Don't go nowhere else because I want to know where you are and you're safe." | 3:14 |
Ira Lee Jones | It wasn't that we were going to get into anything because you didn't have to do—There were people who even lost their lives and nobody know today how, just riding along and somebody decided, "I don't want to see them niggers riding or walking or whatever." They'd be gone. | 4:13 |
Paul Ortiz | What would happen? | 4:38 |
Ira Lee Jones | That would be the $64,000 question. They would never find them. Lots of kids just came up missing, and nobody could ever find them. The police, I don't think they looked for them. Bull Connor was in charge of—He was Birmingham commissioner, and he was for segregation as much as anybody in the world. He was the one who had the dogs sicced on the Riders and the water. | 4:41 |
Paul Ortiz | He took over in the '30s, right? | 5:26 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah. But he had been commissioner a long time. | 5:29 |
Paul Ortiz | Yeah, I remember that. Was he a radio announcer or something? | 5:39 |
Ira Lee Jones | He was. He was the radio announcer, and he could talk. He had a great voice, and that's how he got to be commissioner because he could talk so well. He wasn't very nice to any members of his family. You know he wasn't going to be nice to us. Everybody in Birmingham knew him. He had had some problems with the law, and he went away and stayed about three years. He came back and got the same job back again. | 5:44 |
Paul Ortiz | So you began going to Industrial High School during the early '30s? | 6:34 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. | 6:39 |
Paul Ortiz | And you had— | 6:42 |
Ira Lee Jones | At the middle '30s. | 6:43 |
Paul Ortiz | —your aspirations. You were thinking about being a seamstress. Were there particular courses or teachers that you really liked at Industrial? | 6:45 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Mrs. Coleman, who taught clothing. What is that man's name? Jesus. Mr. Wells, who taught physical education. It was so many teachers down there. Mrs. Baker, who taught English and Mrs. Fannie Smith that taught English. | 6:58 |
Paul Ortiz | So there were some really, in your opinion, you had some really good teachers? | 7:44 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. | 7:47 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you have a chance to get involved in extracurricular activities? | 7:52 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes, I sang in the choir. | 8:02 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, was that the school choir? | 8:02 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes, the high school choir. | 8:03 |
Paul Ortiz | I haven't heard much about the school choir. Would you do concerts in different areas? | 8:06 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. We did concerts. Most of the time, we did concerts at the school or either at the city auditorium. We performed for Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Bethune. One thing that Parker, I say Parker, that was Industrial then, that we had that most of the other schools really didn't have, even the White schools, every star that came to Birmingham came to Parker. They gave us concerts, and they let us give them concerts. | 8:10 |
Ira Lee Jones | We got a lot of experience like that because they knew we were the only group of Blacks they could get to. Weren't nothing there but Blacks, 3,000 of us. | 8:58 |
Paul Ortiz | Who would be some of those stars that you remember? | 9:14 |
Ira Lee Jones | Eartha Kitt, the band leaders, Count Basie, you name them, they were there. Nat King Cole. Answer the telephone, please. I'm trying to say some other names. I can't even think of them right now, but there was lots of them. Ella Fitzgerald. Any of them came through, they came to Parker. They would call an assembly, and we'd go in and they would sing or talk or whatever. | 9:19 |
Ira Lee Jones | The fellow who wrote the—What his name? Wrote the Negro National Anthem we call it now. He came. That was the first time I had really paid any attention to people coming that was nationally known. He came and he gave us the description of how he wrote the song and why, and we sang it. I remember that we had to stand up, and I wanted to know why do we have to stand up to sing this song. | 10:15 |
Ira Lee Jones | He said one of these days it would be a popular song to sing, and it is now. It's in nearly every church hymnal. | 10:59 |
Paul Ortiz | Lift Every Voice and Sing? | 11:09 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah. When I think about it, I say, "Well, I did get there before all the history was made." I enjoyed that. | 11:12 |
Paul Ortiz | One more question from your childhood. Growing up, did your family get down to the downtown area much, like 18th and Worth and— | 11:34 |
Ira Lee Jones | No, not down that part. They would go shopping quite a bit, but they didn't frequent the 17th and 18th Street area. That was the rowdy area, and mostly young people frequent that area. It could be a really hazardous place to be some Saturday nights. The most violent thing that I saw down there, I was working for a music company, but the man sold only sacred music. | 11:48 |
Ira Lee Jones | I was going to the post office to mail some packages off, and there was a lady and a man standing on the corner of Fourth Avenue and 17th Street. A man came down the street behind her, and he came from this direction here. I was coming straight this way, and he passed me before I got to the corner. He went where these people were standing waiting for the light to change and hit the man on the neck with a—You know what a straight razor is? With a straight razor and cut his head off, and his head hit the ground before he did. | 12:29 |
Ira Lee Jones | I was one frightened Black lady. I was a girl. I was in high school. I ran back to the shop, hollering my head off. My daddy had to come get me because I wasn't going out that door. Oh, that was terrible. That was the most violent thing I saw. | 13:20 |
Paul Ortiz | What was the name of the shop you were working at? | 13:44 |
Ira Lee Jones | A. Jackson Music Company, and they sold only sacred music. | 13:46 |
Paul Ortiz | Was that down on Fourth Avenue? | 13:53 |
Ira Lee Jones | Fourth Avenue between 17th and 16th Street. | 13:54 |
Paul Ortiz | So that area just could get very rowdy? | 14:02 |
Ira Lee Jones | It could get very rowdy, yeah. Very rowdy. That's where it look like I think everybody went down there to clown from all over the area, just flock down there. Saturday evening, you couldn't walk. Movies be through, and they'd be screaming and hollering at each other. Somebody be fighting. Somebody be looking for their boyfriend or their husband or their wife or something. Some kind of confusion all the time. | 14:04 |
Ira Lee Jones | But then there were days when it was just calm and peaceful, like everything was supposed to be. But it could be rough. There were people in Birmingham who would not go near for that one because it was a rough part of town. | 14:33 |
Paul Ortiz | What were some of the popular hangouts and that? | 14:56 |
Ira Lee Jones | They had Bob's Boy. It was a big place that they could go and eat and drink and dance. They had the shoeshine parlor that was owned by the fellow that everybody called Rat Killer. Rat Killer was a funny kind of person. He was just as calm and nice and sweet as he could be, but he was a crook, I guess. He owned the shoeshine parlor. He drove a Cadillac. His wife drove a Cadillac. Everybody who worked for him drove a Cadillac and dressed in three-piece suits every day. | 14:59 |
Ira Lee Jones | He had a house in the northwest part of Birmingham that was really a nice house, and he sold chitlins at that house. That's basically what he was supposed to be selling, but he did more than that and doing more than that at the shoeshine parlor. But Rat Killer was the main godfather type of person, carried a roll of money in his pockets. I don't see how he got it in his pockets. He'd roll it up and stick it in his pocket, big roll of money. | 15:59 |
Paul Ortiz | Were there rumors about what he would do? | 16:47 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Plenty of rumors saying he was peddling dope, prostitution, and everything else that he could find, but he was never arrested. | 16:49 |
Paul Ortiz | Now the shoeshine parlor, that wasn't a shoeshine parlor, was it? | 17:07 |
Ira Lee Jones | It was a shoeshine parlor in the front. I don't know what was in the back. | 17:12 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, okay. That was on? | 17:14 |
Ira Lee Jones | On Fourth Avenue and 17th Street between 17th and 18th Street where the shoeshine parlor was. | 17:20 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. I thought that might have just been the name for it, but they actually shined shoes. | 17:22 |
Ira Lee Jones | No, they would actually shine your shoes out front. Now, what they were doing in the back was another question. | 17:36 |
Paul Ortiz | So you were actually working in that area for a while? | 17:44 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes, I did. I worked in that area the whole time I was in high school in the summertime and in the afternoon, I would go by. Especially when we didn't have to take choir practice until 5:00, I'd go by and close up the shop and stuff and, in the summer, I would work. | 17:47 |
Paul Ortiz | Would your parents worry about you? | 18:15 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-mm. They didn't worry about me as long as I was there. I could come right out and catch the bus right across the street, and I'd go straight home because the man I was working for was a very nice person. He didn't let nobody mess with the girls that worked for him. We worked with him. We would demonstrate some of his songs. About four or five of us would demonstrate his songs sometimes. | 18:15 |
Ira Lee Jones | He would come pick you up and bring you home, and nobody didn't bother you. Everybody knew that nobody was going to bother Mr. Jackson's girls, so we had no problem. | 18:40 |
Paul Ortiz | What was his name? Mr.? | 18:53 |
Ira Lee Jones | Jackson. Alfred Jackson. | 18:54 |
Paul Ortiz | And the shop sold sheet music? | 19:00 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. All kinds of books and sheet music, sacred songs. | 19:03 |
Paul Ortiz | I think you told me the name of it. | 19:09 |
Ira Lee Jones | A. Jackson Music Company. | 19:12 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. Now, there were, I know, a number of theaters down there. Would you catch a movie every once in a while? | 19:14 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes. The main one we would get would be the Famous Theater, and they used to bring in quite a few movies, some of the better movies. There was one across the street. Gosh, I can't remember the name of that one right now. | 19:31 |
Paul Ortiz | Carver? | 19:50 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, no, Carver came later. One across the street. They finally tore that one down. They didn't show nothing over there but westerns, so I really can't remember the name of that one. But the Famous would show really nice movies most of the time, and that's the only place we would see a decent movie until they did build the Carver. The Carver was built on 17th Street. On 17th Street, it was built here like this, right on the 17th Street and Fourth Avenue. | 19:52 |
Ira Lee Jones | And then we saw really good movies all the time. And then they tore that other movie down over there because it was just going into all just kind of disrepair, and they started showing the westerns at the Famous. | 20:40 |
Paul Ortiz | What were your favorite movies? | 21:05 |
Ira Lee Jones | I liked Some Like It Hot. I liked musicals mostly, I think. I think I liked the musicals better. I didn't like the mysteries. I'd be covering up, ducking and dodging everywhere else to keep from seeing what was going to happen. And I don't like animals. | 21:13 |
Paul Ortiz | During the time that you're working at AJ Jackson, you were going to Industrial High School and—I lost my train of thought. | 21:53 |
Ira Lee Jones | At the same time, I was playing for churches. | 22:19 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, I know what I was going to ask you. You mentioned earlier that you are meeting kids from all over town now. Were you making new friends? | 22:32 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah. Your classmates. Yeah, you'd get to be real good friends with the classmates. But you didn't do too much with the kids that were not in your class or in the choir. In that immediate group, you would get to be very good friends. Some of us are still in contact with each other. But we had eight sections of ninth graders. Well, the ninth graders, my section was section three. I knew everybody in there, where they lived, what their interests were. | 22:43 |
Ira Lee Jones | We knew each other really well, and we still do. When every once in a while you'd run across one and you'd be happy to see them. But the others, you'd have to wonder, "Where did I see her before?" Because there'd be so many of them, you couldn't get to know them all. But the ones in your immediate group and all the choir members and all the people in your section, you knew them perfectly. | 23:19 |
Paul Ortiz | Was there any sense at Industrial High School of color discrimination? | 23:42 |
Ira Lee Jones | There was nobody there to discriminate. I tell you what. The biggest problem we had was that even fit into that category, if we had some light-skinned kids in your class or there were one or two light-skinned people on the campus and people would pass by and say, "Look at that. Look at that." But there were no White kids there. We knew they were all Black. | 23:54 |
Ira Lee Jones | If they went to Parker, they were Black. You could forget it. But there was some not as dark as others, and they might get picked on for a little while. And then they'd forget about it and go on. | 24:24 |
Paul Ortiz | So what was your next step after graduating from Parker? You graduated in 19— | 24:43 |
Ira Lee Jones | 1939. I went to Alabama A&M in Huntsville. Normal is what they call it. | 24:53 |
Paul Ortiz | What kind of a move was that? | 25:10 |
Ira Lee Jones | To me, it was one of those things you do because it is there. I had not really planned. My mother had planned for me to go to Alabama State, but I didn't like the idea of going to Alabama State. It was a little too open for me, too easy to get off the campus. So I chose Alabama A&M because it was in a rural area too far to walk to town. | 25:22 |
Ira Lee Jones | It was offering the same subjects that they were offering here in Montgomery. A lot of my classmates was going to A&M. So it was the next logical place for me to go, and it was inexpensive. It was $17 a quarter. Try that now. | 25:52 |
Paul Ortiz | $17 for a book. | 26:20 |
Ira Lee Jones | More than that for your book. | 26:22 |
Paul Ortiz | So now you felt at the time, now, you had visited Alabama State? | 26:26 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I had been to Alabama State several times on visits and even the choir had been down there, concert, for the weekend, and I really wasn't impressed. | 26:32 |
Paul Ortiz | What was it about Alabama State that didn't impress you? One thing you mentioned, you felt that it was too close to the— | 26:45 |
Ira Lee Jones | It was too close to the city. I didn't see where it had any room for growth at all. That wasn't the most important thing, but it was just Montgomery seemed open to me. I'm not comfortable going to Montgomery to shop now. It does not seem like it's a real place, and it didn't seem like that to me then. But when I went to A&M, we are here, and we parked the car. We get out. We are at the school, and here it is. This is what you get. | 26:53 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you sense that race relations— | 27:43 |
Ira Lee Jones | It was more of a community. There was nothing about race relations there, not a thing. Everything on that campus was Negro. | 27:48 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, when you started at A&M, it was in 1940? | 28:08 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. | 28:11 |
Paul Ortiz | 1940. What was the school life like there? | 28:15 |
Ira Lee Jones | Well, I enjoyed it. It was an extension, really, of high school. I joined the choir. I enjoyed that tremendously. We did more traveling there than we did in high school. All my classes were familiar. I had pretty good background in the subject matter, even in geography, and that was not to be said for all the children that came to the school. | 28:20 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, really? | 28:56 |
Ira Lee Jones | No. Some of them came from rural areas. They had never seen a map or a globe and this kind of thing. But I couldn't say that for my school because we had been pretty well-taught. | 28:57 |
Paul Ortiz | Were there students who were coming from the North to A&M? | 29:15 |
Ira Lee Jones | We didn't have too many kids from the North at that time. We had a few from Detroit and maybe one or two from Chicago, but now they have lots and lots of kids from out of state. But this school, the president was one individual who was not interested in publicizing that school at all. We couldn't even get the football scores recorded in the newspaper at that time. | 29:24 |
Ira Lee Jones | He didn't want nobody to know it was up there, I think. So we got really the kids from Alabama, and they were mostly rural Alabama. | 29:52 |
Paul Ortiz | So it seemed like that was done on purpose? | 30:05 |
Ira Lee Jones | I think it was done on purpose. I think maybe Dr. Drake was kind of bound by you do this for us and we'll do this for you. But the state would tell him what to do. Nobody could figure out why he didn't want any publicity for the school. But after he was not president anymore, the school has just blossomed. So you wouldn't know if it was the same school. | 30:07 |
Paul Ortiz | Were you there when he left? | 30:43 |
Ira Lee Jones | No, I wasn't. But every time I go up there, I'm amazed at how much progress they really made. Last time I went up there, I got lost on the campus. I was walking around, and I looked up, I said, "I'm in the wrong place." I had to turn around and go back to get my bearing to see really where I was. It had really improved. But he was not improving. He was not expanding anything. This is what you get. This is it. | 30:45 |
Ira Lee Jones | You pay your money, that little money you did have to pay, and that was it. But there was some nice teachers. Always had somebody you could go to there for help. They were courteous, kind, considerate people. | 31:22 |
Paul Ortiz | So, at that point, did you know that you were kind of changing your course to teach? | 31:47 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-mm. That wasn't my idea at all. My classmates would be gathered in this little group, "Come on. Let's go over this again. So we get this really down pat. Come on, Irene. You going to be teaching this one of these days." "Not me. I don't plan to teach nobody nothing." But they would say, "Come on anyway. Well, sit right here. And then we all get into the discussion." But I was not into it. | 31:56 |
Ira Lee Jones | But clothing, anything in home ec, they'd get my perfect attention, but not that subject matter so much. Not to say that I needed to teach it. I want to know it, but I want to be able to pass my classes. But I wasn't interested in teaching until graduation. | 32:30 |
Paul Ortiz | Graduation? | 32:53 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. Then I was offered a job that I refused to refuse. I said, "I better take this and see what I can do with this." | 32:55 |
Paul Ortiz | How did that job offer come about? | 33:05 |
Ira Lee Jones | Through the business office, basically. | 33:08 |
Paul Ortiz | You said a school in St. Clair County or? | 33:17 |
Ira Lee Jones | Mm-hmm. Elementary school in St. Clair County. It's no longer there now. | 33:20 |
Paul Ortiz | What was the name of that school? | 33:29 |
Ira Lee Jones | All I know is St. Clair County School. I think that was its name. | 33:32 |
Paul Ortiz | Is that a grammar school? | 33:35 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, a grammar school. | 33:38 |
Paul Ortiz | So did you immediately move from Huntsville to— | 33:47 |
Ira Lee Jones | No. I went back home. Went back to Birmingham. See, I never changed my official residence from Birmingham. It was still Birmingham. I would just go there and spend the week and, Friday evening, I'd get the bus and go home. I did that for about 13 years. And then I got a job in Birmingham. | 33:50 |
Paul Ortiz | So you would have come back to Birmingham about, what, '53 or? | 34:26 |
Ira Lee Jones | Was it '53 or '55? '55, I think, or something like that. It might have been '53. It's been so long now. | 34:32 |
Paul Ortiz | Now, when you came back to Birmingham during the mid '50s, could you see changes? | 34:42 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes, I saw that there were people who were not content as they were when I was there all week. See, I never did really leave. On weekends, I'd always be there to go to church and stuff. But when I came back home and started working in Birmingham, I found that people were not as content as they were when I was in school. They started griping about we having to pay tax and we can't get our roads fixed. The water has turned brown in the neighborhood. That's not so in the other neighborhood. | 34:57 |
Ira Lee Jones | My house needed painting and the landlord said he wasn't going to paint it, but he went up on the rent. It was just dozens of things that they complained about. When I was growing up, they didn't complain, at least they didn't complain in my area. | 35:41 |
Paul Ortiz | What do you think accounted for the difference in that? | 36:00 |
Ira Lee Jones | I think maybe education and the fact that they began to see, well, television, radio and newspaper would give accounts of what was happening in other places. "Oh, they're doing that. Now, they don't do that for us here. We paying tax, too." At first, they didn't think about the tax wasn't that much. But as they went up on the taxes, they said, "Wait a minute. This is our money, too. Why can't we get our roads fixed if they get their roads fixed? We pay taxes and paying tax on home." | 36:03 |
Ira Lee Jones | People in the area where they really had bought up homes, they were really unhappy. But they didn't think so much about the tax that they were paying on food and stuff. That was just a few pennies. So they didn't gripe too much about that, but they did about the taxes on their homes. And then they started paving streets, and they would pave a street not in front of your house, but up to you maybe to the end of the block and then still charge you for it. | 36:50 |
Ira Lee Jones | So the unfairness of it really got to some people, and they'd sit around and talk about it and talk about it. They all get angry. And then they decided they would write letters and make phone calls to no avail, but they were still complaining. | 37:31 |
Paul Ortiz | Where would people gather at and talk about those— | 37:51 |
Ira Lee Jones | In the churches and sometime on the street corners. But most places the Negroes had to congregate was at church. | 37:54 |
Paul Ortiz | So the conditions, there had been those injustices all along. | 38:24 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah. All along. But it was inexpensive, so they didn't worry too much about it. I remember when my mother and father was paying $5 a year house tax. I also remember when it went up to $45 a year house tax. | 38:31 |
Paul Ortiz | Just in one? | 38:51 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah. This year it was $5. Next year was 45. So then this big jump. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Yeah. So that's exactly what happened. It just, all of a sudden, we going to put mills on. They say, "We're going to add a mill." You don't know what a mill is. We didn't know what a mill was. But I still don't understand how they can say this is a half mill. When they going to put on say 10, $15, and say a half mill. | 38:53 |
Ira Lee Jones | Nobody pays any attention too much until they get the bill. Then they say, "Oh, wait a minute." So the complaints started. | 39:29 |
Paul Ortiz | This job happened in the early '50s or? | 39:39 |
Ira Lee Jones | In the early '50s, mm-hmm. The Black man could get very few really nice jobs. They could get what the White man didn't want. A Black woman could get a better job than a Black man. Excuse me. | 39:42 |
Ira Lee Jones | '60s. Let me see. My daddy died in '64. We were a small family. My grandfather died in '60. That was 35 years since we had a death in that family in our little group. My daddy died in '64. My brother died in '70. My mother died in '74. So that leaves me. I don't know what in the world I'm going to do because I don't like living by myself. I said at the funeral, I said, "Well, Lord, I'm by myself. What in the world am I going to do?" My brother had one daughter. She said, "Auntie, you still got me and you still got my mama. So you all right." | 40:12 |
Ira Lee Jones | When my mother passed, I was not well. My sister-in-law came out to my house. This is the one that you was talking to here. Came out to our house and she stayed with me until I was able to go back to work. My niece came home. She was living in California, and she came home and stayed another month with me. She said, "I got to go back, but I'm going to take you over to Mama's house and you stay with her until I can see what we can work out." I said, "Okay." | 41:21 |
Ira Lee Jones | So I go and stay with my sister-in-law. My sister-in-law got another job. She moved out to Montgomery. I stayed in the house. I rented my house out, the home out. Then I decided I wanted to retire. I retired early, but I had been working 35 years, so it didn't matter. In Alabama at that time, you could work 30 years and retire. Now it's 25, but I worked 35 years, so I retired. I went to California and stayed with this niece for five years, and I didn't like it. | 42:01 |
Ira Lee Jones | So I said, "I want to come back to Birmingham, but I don't want to go live in the house by myself." By that time, my sister-in-law had moved down here. She said, "Well, come on to Tuskegee and stay with us." I said, "Irene come to Tuskegee and stay with you?" She said, "Come to Tuskegee and stay with me," because she and her sister was buying this house. So I left California and came here. That was in about '82, '83, and I've been here since, sick, well, whatever, right here. | 42:45 |
Ira Lee Jones | We live like angels. We don't have problems. If anything needs doing, we get together and we get it done. When I'm sick, they all just right there. If one of them gets sick, we all right there. It has been one of those things that people say, "You do what?" When we tell them that we all live together, "What?" They can't understand it. But it just started from the fact that both families got along so well together. There was never any difference between the families. We're all family no how. Everybody was just compatible, and we've been living together all these years. | 43:34 |
Paul Ortiz | That's great. Mrs. Jones, I just had maybe a few more questions. | 44:32 |
Ira Lee Jones | Okay. | 44:40 |
Paul Ortiz | I don't want to take up your entire day. Now, earlier you said that there were—It seemed to be that when you came back to live more or less permanently at that time in Birmingham—I'm going to change this tape. | 44:40 |
Paul Ortiz | When you went to move back in Birmingham in the mid-50s, you had seen, or you saw, that the political climate in terms of what Black people were saying about conditions seemed to be different. | 0:10 |
Ira Lee Jones | It was, it was completely different. And there were a few Blacks who was interested in being elected to different offices, becoming policemen and this kind of thing, and one or two succeeded, but most of them didn't. That was frustrating. | 0:27 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you remember particular areas in, say, the early, mid-50s, organizations, leaders, groups, that seemed to be kind of leading at that point? | 0:50 |
Ira Lee Jones | No, they didn't really get organized into groups until Martin Luther King came. Then he seemed to have been the catalyst that just kind of pulled them all together. They were ready, I wish I had, I wish I could. But when he said, "Let's" they all just fell in line, and especially the Black ministers, and that was the thing that I think just got everybody into it. Because when the Black minister speak, most people listen. And the Black ministers got into it so thoroughly because they had been counseling people trying to keep the lid on things, I think. And when they said, "Okay, it's time," everybody was ready. | 1:12 |
Paul Ortiz | Was there also, before the organized activity in the '60s, when you came back in the '50s, was there a sense that, even just on the individual level, like say on the buses, that the Black people were beginning to be— | 2:05 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, they were more aggressive. They were several incidents where they just really did not move. When the bus driver said, "Move to the back," they said, "I it ain't going nowhere." But usually it was in the section of town where the bus driver was a little bit afraid to say too much. And I can remember coming home on a bus, they started running specials, but you could get on the bus, and the whole bus would be just full of children coming home or going to school. And one of the bus drivers had tried to, the conductor said, bus driver and they had a conductor in the middle, and the conductor had tried to be a little smart with some of the kids, calling them names and press one thing then another. So one of the boys got off the bus and threw a rock back, and the man had the door open and he hit the bus, hit the conductor. | 2:24 |
Ira Lee Jones | He jumped off the bus and took his pistol out, started running behind the boy and somebody pulled the bell. That's only the connection he had with the bus drive. And he pulled the bell, ding, ding, and then the bus would go off. So they pull the bell, that bus went off. He had to put that gun in his pocket and run. He was flying up first he had trying to catch that bus, and a bus load of kids was having a ball. We was calling, we were laughing again, and "Run man, run!" And he was running, he had no opinions getting off the bus. | 3:39 |
Ira Lee Jones | See, it was against the law for him to get off the bus. And if he had killed that boy, or shot him or anything, he would've been in jail for the rest of his life. But he was so mad he didn't think. But I bet you one thing, he didn't get off that bus anymore. Because he had to run back I guess about a half a mile before somebody told him, "Wait now, wait on your crony." And the bus driver said, "What?" The man is off the bus. He got off the bus. They had to stand there, and he stood there wait until he got in. He was out of breath. | 4:22 |
Paul Ortiz | And you were on the bus when this happened? | 5:03 |
Ira Lee Jones | Uh-huh. | 5:05 |
Paul Ortiz | And that was in the '50s? | 5:06 |
Ira Lee Jones | It was funny. It was a serious incident, but it was funny to see him run, because he had to put that gun up and run. Oh boy. We had tough times, but the children did not make it serious. The adults were serious. The kids were not, even during the riot times. It was fun to them, but it wasn't funny to the adults. When we got home and told our parents about it, they almost fainted. | 5:09 |
Paul Ortiz | About the— | 5:51 |
Ira Lee Jones | Bus driver, because he had pulled a gun. And the next day, Parker High School was loaded with parents, complaining, they couldn't have that. So they were complaining to the bus company and the whole bit. | 5:52 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, this is when year going to high school? | 6:10 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, when I was in high school. But it was fun to us. | 6:11 |
Paul Ortiz | And that would've been during the early 1930s? | 6:18 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah. Then late '30s. | 6:22 |
Paul Ortiz | Other kinds of actions like that that you saw or heard about? | 6:29 |
Ira Lee Jones | No, I can't remember any. I remember that because it was so funny, but I don't remember. It wasn't too much. They were never really, most White people were not that open with it. They would know that you could see little signs and hear it in their voices or the way they would not speak to you or not hold the door open, you come out the door with two hands for stuff and they could shut the door on it. But after the Martin Luther King deal, they'd open the door and hold it for you. Just little things, just nothing that was that great, outstanding, but it just the little things they'd speak when they used to walk by you like you was a pile of dust. But then they said, okay, so they would speak to you. All kinds of stuff. Little things. | 6:37 |
Paul Ortiz | Did you see changes happening during World War II, during all of the talk about a war for democracy? And did it seem like it had that much— | 7:48 |
Ira Lee Jones | It didn't have, no. When they were doing the war, it wasn't that much, I didn't see that much because I was always at school most. But I didn't see that much difference in the way things were going. I had no idea until my brother came home, he had been in bootcamp and he came home and he would tell us the differences that they had in the army, but at home there was no difference that I saw. | 8:08 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, you talked about the segregated service. | 8:53 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah. Yeah. | 8:56 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. Did he express opinions about that? Was that something that— | 8:58 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh yeah. He said it was very uncomfortable, because you didn't know whether they were going to speak to you or shoot you. And they have had incidents where some of the boys were shot by other fellas in the service because they going to shoot them a nigger tonight. This kind of expressions that they would make, and pour water in the beds, ugly little things like that. | 9:04 |
Paul Ortiz | Do you think that that experience may have inspired him to become more involved in politics? Did he talk about things like voting or— | 9:36 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh, he was, I hadn't voted, but he wasn't into right and anything. What he really had was to protect their property they did a lot of stuff. They lived where they lived, they would have men in their cars. They had take turns parking near the entrance that they could get into that area, and they would sit there all night with their guns cocked, keeping anybody out of that area, keep them from blowing up their houses because they were blowing them houses right and left in Bethlehem during the Martin Luther King time. | 9:49 |
Ira Lee Jones | And that's about the extent of his being involved in it. He always set it through. And he was into coaching and refereeing and he had some incidents doing that. But he just said, "Well, that's part of living. He'd be going out of town to call games and get there, and nobody there, no Blacks there but him." But he say he wasn't afraid. And he would have— | 10:34 |
Paul Ortiz | So he lived on the other side of Center Street? | 11:09 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yeah, he lived on, yeah, right. | 11:11 |
Paul Ortiz | Oh, so that was the area known as Dynamite Hill? | 11:13 |
Ira Lee Jones | Right. | 11:16 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. Okay. Because I talked to a few people up there, and they had to organize— | 11:17 |
Ira Lee Jones | Had to organize and sit watch to keep those folk out of there. Because they were blowing houses right and left, they didn't even know whose house they were blowing. And I don't guess they really cared, because there was some nice houses over there, and they, yeah. | 11:27 |
Paul Ortiz | At this time were you a registered voter? | 11:52 |
Ira Lee Jones | Yes. | 11:54 |
Paul Ortiz | And what was— | 11:57 |
Ira Lee Jones | I registered to vote in Gadsden, Alabama. It wasn't too difficult. There was a poll watcher there who sat in on all the registration to see that they didn't ask you them crazy questions. Because they were asking people, before all of the Martin Luther King business, they would ask you to almost recite the Constitution of United States, ask you all kinds of questions. And most people they hadn't even read it, let alone know what it was all about. But they had assigned a poll watcher, he sat there, he didn't say a word. He just sat there to see that they did not ask you all those questions, that they give you the as long sheet as Moses, and you checked it, yes, no, Random stuff like that. | 11:57 |
Paul Ortiz | So you began voting in the early '60s? | 12:54 |
Ira Lee Jones | In the early '60s. Yeah, '61. | 13:00 |
Paul Ortiz | '61. Now you mentioned that, in your opinion, that the television and the news, the increasing volume of the news, seemed to a result in a quickening of Black political— | 13:13 |
Ira Lee Jones | Black political power, yeah. If it can happen everywhere else, it can happen here too. But we were under the impression that everything on the other side of Mason-Dixon line was already integrated. You see, we have been told, "Oh yeah, you ought to go to Detroit, because you can sit where you want. You can live where you want." Yeah, you could, in a gutter. But that's not what they told us. We were under the impression that if you just crossed the Mason-Dixon line, you was in little heaven. Everything was great. But when we cross the Mason-Dicker line we find out that it is not great, not even till this day it's not great. I honestly would rather stay in the south than live in that area, because you know what to expect. So you don't go around with the unfulfilled dreams. | 13:31 |
Ira Lee Jones | When they first integrated Birmingham, every cafe, every eating place in town that had been basically White, bought paper plates and cups and sauces and stuff like that. Well, to their dear amazement, the Whites didn't go to eat, the Blacks didn't go to eat. They had all this stuff because they were determined they were not going to eat behind the Blacks, you go in—But in the north, you go up there and from Syracuse, they serves you out of their plates. But then they go over there and drop it in a trashcan and break it up. | 14:51 |
Ira Lee Jones | So I would rather be down here where I know what I was expecting, if I don't want to get out of the plate there was a paper place, I stay at home and eat my food at home. See, forget about that. And that's exactly what happened in some of those places they really had to go out of business, because the Whites were afraid to go in there thinking the Negroes going come in there and act cool, but they didn't, because the Negroes stayed at home. Number one, they didn't have money to pay those prices, so they knew not to go, because we were always at the bottom of the scale as far as salaries were concerned. | 15:43 |
Paul Ortiz | For events, and in Africa during that time, some of liberation struggles happening there. | 16:28 |
Ira Lee Jones | Oh that telephone drive me crazy. | 16:35 |
Paul Ortiz | Mrs. Jones, I was going to ask if it seemed, were Black people in America, in Birmingham, watching events that were happening in Africa at that time? | 16:42 |
Ira Lee Jones | I don't think so. Not at that time. They were too interested in what was happening in America. | 16:55 |
Paul Ortiz | Okay. If you were writing your biography, and you had to think of maybe the conclusion, and you were trying to sum up your life, and try to think about what were things that inspired you and kept you going, and you just had to give maybe an assessment of the things that just really inspired you, what would they be? | 17:09 |
Ira Lee Jones | Hold that point a minute. I thought about the name of that place where the Klux Klans gather, it's Cascades Plunge. | 17:45 |
Paul Ortiz | Cascades Plunge? | 17:53 |
Ira Lee Jones | Let's see. What inspired me? I think what really kept most of us going was our church affiliations. It seems funny that everything that centered around Black life, centered around the church. That's where we went to socialize. We'd have dinners, and people would bring in the best food they could find, and them cook ladies could really cook. And we would sing and tell different stories and relate things that had happened to you in the funniest way you could think of. | 17:57 |
Ira Lee Jones | And everybody had a good time. Then we sang and we prayed and we listened to the preacher preach half a day. It was all right, we didn't care, we had nothing else to do. So the church was a center, and every member, it seems that, I don't know any member of my church who had never told me that I didn't do a good job. I don't care what it was, even until about three months ago, I went back to my home church, still busy. I still got that same praise. | 18:53 |
Ira Lee Jones | "You looking so well," and I'm half dead. I had at least four heart attacks, "Don't tell me I look well." But this is where your inspiration came from. And most Negroes did survive through the church. And I think maybe, if we get a little closer in our churches, we wouldn't have all this street business. Because everybody tended to everybody else's business. If they saw a child doing something they didn't have no business, they would talked to the child and if that didn't work they'd talk to the parent. Well, you got everybody on the same side, and it's none of this, "You don't tell my child what to do." If you going to be a part of that child's life, you be a part of that child's life. And everybody was a part of your life, and they all enjoyed you being around and you enjoyed being around them. | 19:31 |
Ira Lee Jones | And they always had a good word for you. They like your shoes, your dress, you did a good job. "Oh, I liked the way you played that song." "I liked the way you sang." "You going to sing such and such song for me today?" When you walk into the church. And that make you feel like somebody know you're living, and that's the way they make you feel. But now very few people do that. | 20:48 |
Paul Ortiz | So the church was the key? | 21:19 |
Ira Lee Jones | The churches was the key. | 21:23 |
Item Info
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund